to cushion hit you hard if your unrestrained head happens to get close to the steering wheel but not as hard as the steering wheel itself would hit you.
> to cushion hit you hard if your unrestrained head happens to get close to the steering wheel but not as hard as the steering wheel itself would hit you.
The belt does that unless you literally have a rubber neck.
The point of the airbag is to restrain your head so that it does not snap forward too fast and break your neck (heads are heavy, and necks were not built for sudden forward deceleration), that's why it needs to inflate so fast: it has to be fully inflated before you faceplant in it, so that it can slow down your head's forward movement, that's why it has vents and starts deflating as soon as it's fully inflated, and by the time you've stopped it is fully deflated.
If it were a cushion it would have no reason to deflate on its own and the deflation would not, in fact, make any sense at all.
> Google "HANS device". That's a restraint.
The HANS device is a better restraint, it is also a much more cumbersome one and requires wearing a helmet, nobody is going to wear a HANS in their while driving to the corner store.
Google "HANS device". That's a restraint.